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Thursday, July 27, 2017

Q. How can I achieve a ‘dry’ sound?

By Various

I record and mix in my 'studio',
which isn't too great acoustically. I can manage somehow when mixing, by
working on headphones and doing lots of cross‑referencing, but the problem is
that when it comes to recording I really hate the room sound on my vocals,
and most of all on acoustic guitars, which I use a lot. The reverb
tail is pretty short, but I'm still having a hard time getting a nice
dry sound on my guitars, because I can't record dry! I know that the
obvious solution is to treat the room, but the truth of the matter is that
I can't do much better than this for now. So is there any way to treat
a 'roomy' sound (on vocals and guitar) to make it sound drier? I know
it is very difficult, or maybe impossible, especially for acoustic guitars, but
any kind of suggestion, even for small improvements, would be very welcome.

A
high‑resolution spectrum analyser such as Schwa's Schope lets you quickly and
precisely home in on specific resonant frequencies that may be responsible for
a coloured or uneven sound.

Via SOS web site

SOS contributor Mike Senior replies:
Given that the reverb doesn't have a 'tail' as such, I reckon it's
the reverb tone that's the biggest problem, so trying to use some kind of
gating or expansion to remove it is unlikely to yield a useful
improvement. You could help minimise the ambient sound pickup by using
a directional mic for both vocals and guitar and keeping a fairly
close placement. For vocals, very close miking is pretty commonplace, but for
acoustic guitar you might want to experiment with using an XY pair of mics
instead of a single cardioid, to avoid 'spotlighting' one small area of
the guitar too much. That setup will usually give you a more balanced
sound because its horizontal pickup is wider than a single cardioid on its
own. In all but the smallest rooms, it's usually possible to get
a respectable dry vocal sound just by hanging a couple of duvets
behind the singer, and because I suspect that you've already tried this
fairly common trick, I'm suspicious that room resonances are actually the
biggest problem, rather than simple early reflections per se. Duvets are quite
effective for mid‑range and high frequencies, but aren't too good at dealing
with the lower‑frequency reflections that give rise to room resonances.

So given that room resonance is
likely to be the problem, what can you do about it? Well, if you've no budget
for acoustic treatment, I'd seriously consider doing your overdubs in
a different room, if there's one available. If you're recording on
a laptop, or have a portable recorder, maybe you can use that to
record on location somewhere if you're confined to just the one room at home.
I used to do this kind of thing a lot when I first started doing
home recordings, carting around a mic, some headphones and a portable
multitrack machine to wherever was available.

Part of what the room resonances
will be doing is putting scary peaks and troughs into the lower mid‑range of
your recorded frequency response, but the exact frequency balance you get will
depend on exactly where your player and microphone are located in relation to
the dimensions of the room, so a bit of determined experimentation in this
respect might yield a more suitable sound, if not quite an uncoloured one.
You might find that actually encouraging a few more high‑frequency early
reflections using a couple of judiciously placed plywood boards might also
improve the recorded room sound a little. A lot of domestic
environments can have a bit too much high‑frequency absorption, on account
of carpets, curtains, and soft furnishings.

After recording, you could also get
busy with some narrow EQ peaks in the 100‑500Hz range, to try to flatten any
obvious frequency anomalies. One thing to listen for in particular is any notes
that seem to boom out more than others: a very narrow notch EQ aimed
precisely at that note's fundamental frequency will probably help even things
out. You can find these frequencies by ear in time‑honoured fashion by sweeping
an EQ boost around, but in my experience a good spectrum analyser like
Schwa's Schope plug‑in will let you achieve a better result in
a fraction of the time. However, while EQ may address some of the
frequency‑domain issues of the room sound, it won't stop resonant frequencies
from sustaining longer, which is just as much part of the problem, and there's
no processing I know of that will deal with that.

For my money, this is the kind of
situation where you can spend ages fannying around with complicated processing
to achieve only a moderate improvement, whereas nine times out of 10
you'll get better results much more quickly by just re‑recording the part.